Yesterday's announcement of the SEOmoz premium landing page contest created an exceptional buzz - we've already had more than a dozen people contact us about creating their version of the document. In addition, I received some excellent advice from two experts in the field - Jon Mendez of OTTO Digital and Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow. To help anyone and everyone who's in the field of landing page design & creation, I though it would be valuable to share their wisdom.

...Traffic and associated conversions will help determine the first part of test design, what kind of test to create. A good rule of thumb is 100 conversions per page (or what refer to as recipe) for any test. So an A/B/C test should need about 300 conversions to reach confidence and stability and a 4x3 Multivariate test being an L9 array with 9 recipes would need 900 conversions. WARNING: This is just a rule of thumb. Your results may vary!...

...One of the biggest challenges we face at OTTO Digital is running tests for clients around set timeframes like seasonality and promotions. Anytime your results need to be achieved by a certain date you can compromise confidence because results are unpredictable. Ideally the data and most importantly the stability of the data will determine when your test is over, not your marketing calendar. Test stability is best determined by analyzing results over a period of time and looking for performance fluctuations. Stability is achieved when the tested elements exhibit similar performance behavior across enough data...

...With what Rand has disclosed about his traffic and conversion rates I would suggest running 5 page variations against each other….an A/B/C/D/E test. These pages should be selected based on not only how they look, but how they look compared to one another. This test design should produce a nice data set with high confidence in the 3-4 weeks timeline Rand has suggested.

Another option would be starting with a larger test, maybe 10 pages, and then look to drop pages from the test if they show consistent poor performance, thus increasing the distribution of traffic across the remaining pages and still working within a feasible timeframe for results. The downside to this scenario is that it only works if there is clear confidence among a handful of better performing pages.

Jon's giving truly solid advice here, not just for the SEOmoz test, but for any kind of testing that's performed. He's also done an excellent job of convincing me that we'll need to continue to lean on his expertise throughout the conversion testing process - conveniently, his number's now tattooeed on Rebecca's forehead so I can look at her whenever I need to call :)

Bryan Eisenberg's advice centered on something that may be even more interesting to those actually participating in the contest. Since his insight came over the phone, I'll attempt to list it in the bullet points below:

We should continue to offer three different versions of pricing - monthly vs. 6 months vs. one year - and list them horizontally in a table showing the savings side by side. Apparently his experience suggests that this design would be very effective.

Differentiation is critical to making the landing page successful - Bryan felt that answering the question "why should I spend my time in premium content vs. all the other SEO resources, blogs, forums, etc?" is key to the conversion process.

The laundry list of features needs to become a set of benefits - this parallels what Roberta noted in her review of the page.

Bryan also offered up links to several of Grokdotcom's best posts on the subject of landing page design:

The Q+A "consulting" value isn't coming through in the current page and is likely to have a big impact on conversion rates.

In addition to Bryan & Jon's help, I've also been asked to reveal some critical information about SEOmoz's stats since the launch of premium content so contestants can craft better entry pages. Here you go!

The vast majority (85%+) of conversions have been to visitors who used the inline ads or followed a link from the blog or an article on the site. This serves as further evidence that premium membership appeals very well to those familiar with the brand, but poorly to newcomers.

Hopefully that data will provide enough relevant information for landing page creators to have a fair idea of what to aim towards. I think the big takeaway is - don't optimize for search phrases, optimize to convince those with little - moderate comfort with the brand to take the leap. At least, that's how I'd do it if I entered the contest.

In related news, we received our first submission to the landing page competition, courtesy of Mystery Guest. Be warned, it's semi-NSFW:

I'm not entirely convinced that we can display the page, despite it's comic genius. As Mystery Guest has shown in the past, she can be pretty mean to Neil. Still, it's a valiant effort, and you can see why she's quite clearly the best thing to ever happen to me, period (hence all this business). :)

BTW - Tomorrow we launch the new SEOmoz pricing (sometime in the mid-morning) and we'll also be announcing two new premium member services. Plus - more great content for free members is also on its way.

p.s. Nearly forgot to mention that Offermatica has now added to the prize pot with a 3-month trial subscription of the basic version of their software (worth $30,000 - wow).

p.p.s. Yes - I know there's been a lot of "self-promotional" type blog entries in the past few weeks; with the exception of one more tomorrow, we'll get right back to the business of blogging useful SEO tips & advice without the SEOmoz-centric add-ons.

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Comments
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Perhaps SEOmoz should think about a follow-up contest. It would emphasize that A/B and MVT testing are continual processes, not a one-off project.

Imagine if the top 5 landing page designers were given the opportunity to tweak their entries armed with the knowledge of the best and worst performing elements...

The designers win - another chance to prove they know their stuff and shoot for no.1

The public win - we get to see how the best tweak their landing pages.

SEOmoz wins - an even better converting landing page design.

If it sounds like I'm being selfish, it's because I'm lucky to work with a pretty slick team of designers, IAs and UX gurus and the most enjoyable and valuable things that I have learned from them are during the subsequent re-tweaking of our pages to the Nth degree.

PS. I think Jon Mendez is correct, even though Offermatica offers MVT, it looks you'll be performing a large split test, not multivariate testing! :P

While at SES San Jose to speak about Landing Page Utopia I had stopped at In-N-Out Burger in Sunnyvale. Being an East Coast guy who does not frequent this establishment I was, as always, struck by the simplicity of their menu.Certainly their menu helps optimize both the ordering process for customers and the fulfillment process for employees. It has a great layout as well that I think I'll actually try in the future as a template .

if you know that new visitors don't convert well (which is natural with a paid service that is entirely content driven excluding the tools which are quite niche) then perhaps you should offer a REFERAL SCHEME to existing members.

Each reader here has at least 2-50 other SEO contacts they talk to. They may or may not be aware that they can promote seomoz (I have 3 people in my company checking out the content here). But haven't mentioned it too often to the other seo guys I talk to daily.

cheers brian :-)Also, although I personally use RSS feeds - its damn hard to get through the 200 daily posts and sometimes it gets lagged behind. I'm not always on top of the brilliant features you guys present - and personally, I wouldn't mind receiving a kick ass email/newsletter because moz is one of the better seo sources I read (not only content, its just the coherence and comprehensive nature of the content). Most blogging stuff out there is verbose, inarticulate, incorrect or just a carbon copy of something else – especially within the SEO bloging sphere. I think you guys have the right to remind people about their premium membership (not sure if you track how often people log in to their account or use the tools).

A great example is bruce clay, doesn't come often - but sure delivers some kick when it gets through.

PS just remembered I meant to write something about statistical significance as well - I'm glad Jon brought up the issue of how to collect significant data - it's something I worry about in a lot of our testing (I'm a stats geek really - that's mainly what I studied during my graduate degree).

The maths gets kinda tricky when you are looking for statistical significance in multi-variate testing - I guess that's why offermatica etc. can command the kind of prices they do.

Thanks for the data, Rand. I don't see these posts as self-promotional because (although you guys are going to get a hell of a lot out of the contest) we are going to learn so much watching this play out.

Mystery Guest - you had me laughing with that entry. If there'd been an actual button to click on, I might have signed up for another premium membership....